I Probably Shouldn’t Post This…

This is a post that I probably shouldn’t write. It’s not a feel good post, and a lot of the things I have to say are perhaps not the most fair, but if I can get my point across, maybe you’ll be able to squeeze out an ounce of inspiration by the end of this.

I find myself nauseated with a lot of things going on in my life right now, the first being my job. I love my company, but I hate my job. I know you’ve heard this familiar tale, but I’m going to express it anyway. I wake up every morning, dreading the fact that I have to get ready for the day and spend the next 8 to 9 hours in an office working on soul sucking projects. I am a developer at heart. That is what I went to school for, and it excites me to solve problems, fix errors, and create new software. Sadly, I get to do very little of this at my work, and I find it incredibly frustrating!

With that being said, my primary solution to this temporary issue is not to find another, more developer-oriented job. This may have been what I wanted a year or two ago, but now, I have come to realize that I will never be satisfied working for someone else.

Being told what I must work on, without the flexibility of accepting or declining tasks that best fit my interests and schedule does not sit well with me. I want so badly to tell my manager that of the 5 plus projects currently on my plate, the one I desire to pour my soul into involves fixing and improving the code of a software I helped to create months prior. But the code is functional and it meets everyone’s basic needs and the users have learned how to work around the bugs. The improvement of the code is not crucial and my manager doesn’t care how much I want to work on it. She’s paying me 50K a year, so I’ll do what she says, dammit!

I don’t ever want to be in this position again, even if I worked for a software development company. I want the freedom to work on the projects that mean the most to me. I want the ability to program from 6 AM to 10 AM if I choose to, then spend the rest of the day riding my bicycle in the park. I’ve spent a lot of my life listening to superiors, and I think it’s about time I ditch the boss.

This brings me to what I currently find nauseating: social media.

One reason why I started this blog is because I have always loved to write. Ever since I was in middle school, I have written fantasy stories and characters with complex backgrounds. My high school and college professors have even praised my writing skills whenever I turned in my various essays. I’ll never forget the pride I felt when my professor in my upper level communications course titled Theories of Persuasion roasted the whole class on how horrible their writing skills were. He warned them not to be surprised if they received grades of Cs or below. Then he returned my paper to me with a perfect score and wrote a phrase on how impressed he was with my arguments. Made me giddy.

So I love to write and I’d like to think I’m decent at it. The kicker is, if I want this blog to bring in some income one day, being a strong writer is not good enough. It is also crucial that I have an active presence on social media.

This wouldn’t be so bad, except that I find social media to be infuriatingly superficial. I don’t get anything out of it. Excluding YouTube, the only social media platform I have willingly opened an account for is Facebook. And the only reason why I tolerate Facebook is because, seeing as it is my personal page, I am not obligated to post to it with any amount of regularity. To give you perspective, as I write this in January 2019, my lasts two updates on Facebook were posted on December 4th, and October 14th 2018. But this type of social media scarcity will not fly when trying to generate followers to this blog.

So I’m a member of a blogging group on Facebook. My interactions with this group – of whom I shan’t name – are mostly positive. They listed all the steps necessary to set up a blog, and everyone is so supportive and encouraging when ideas, logos, websites and posts are shared. There are a few actions of this group that irks me, however.

Through this group, I’m participating in a 10-day challenge which is meant to help drive traffic to our blog through social media. The task for today, the second day, is to post a link to one of our blog posts on Twitter, share a link to that tweet in the group, then like and retweet the posts of 10 other members. In theory, it sounds like a good idea. In practice, it is utterly excruciating. It’s causing me to participate in everything I hate about social media. Those ten random members who happen to pick my blog to retweet don’t care about the contents of my post anymore than I care about the 10 posts currently residing on my twitter feed. (Actually it’s seven at the moment. I’ll post the remaining three later tonight since I committed to doing it.) It is incredibly fake, and dare I say, obvious to an outsider that we’re only tweeting things that we were told to tweet, not things that genuinely interest us. I at least strive to read the post, understand the story behind it, and connect with at least one phrase written, which of course makes my job a lot harder as I sift through the uninspiring ones.

If this is how the remaining 8 days will be, I may not continue to participate in the challenge. Being obligated to retweet a post is as soul sucking as working on a lifeless work project, and I’m not convinced the results will be what I imagine: an engaging audience who interact with thoughtful and meaningful comments.

I toy with the idea of deleting all my social media tied to this blog except for Instagram as that has been relatively painless. From what I hear, however, that would be akin to committing blogger suicide. I may be inclined to discuss more on this later.

For now, I want to point out another aspect of this group that I find perplexing. All posts in the blogging Facebook group are moderated, and from what I can tell, the vast majority of them are approved. I just love how, if anyone brings up a question about money – How long until I can expect to make money? Anyone care to share their income? How does blogging make money? – a moderator replies with the same link to a post on 5 ways to make money while blogging, then goes on to turn off commenting on the thread. All other threads are littered with dozens or even hundreds of comments with everyone giving advice, sharing opinions and having conversations, but as soon as the subject of money comes up, nope! You’re not allowed to talk anymore, turn it off! It’s almost as if they know that most of us aren’t going to make it. It is extremely difficult to monetize a blog. But they can’t let us know that. They need us to think they believe in us; how else are we going to keep buying their courses and using their affiliate links?

So I love to write, but I don’t know if I love being a blogger. If I do things the conventional “successful” way – schedules, deadlines, social media and all that jazz – I will only end up freeing my soul from the corporate life only to sell it back to the masses. I just don’t see the point of achieving success if my success is the cause of my daily disdain.

With all that being said, I’d love to hear what you all think? Am I being a whiny brat? Am I trying to have my cake and eat it too? Am I being hypocritical? Or, do you possibly relate? Let me know in the comments below! Believe it or not (after everything I’ve said) I do really want to interact with you all if you made it this far of your own free will. That way, we can build meaningful conversations, and cut out the superficiality! <3

I’ll see you in the next post!